


watched it begin again

by fireflyslove



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens, Canon-typical shenanigans, The TARDIS Knows Things, Time Shenanigans, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-04 22:11:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16798039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyslove/pseuds/fireflyslove
Summary: Thirteen accidentally meets Ten and Rose and shenanigans ensue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soooooo it's been about 5 years since I properly watched DW, and my Who roots are solidly based in RTD-era Ten/Rose so I only have about a 20% idea of what I'm doing here. I'm blatantly ignoring any canon post-season 4 specials because the Fiftieth was, and still is, Bad. Any mischaracterizations or other non-canonical nonsense can be chalked up to wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.
> 
> There's a lot of pronouns going on around here. For the most part, I believe they should be clear, but there's three different pronouns used to refer to the Doctor. I've tried to stick with 'she' for Thirteen and 'he' for past Doctors, but sometimes it might get a little confusing, I apologize. In an attempt to defray confusion, I've capitalized the TARDIS's pronouns. 
> 
> Title from Taylor Swift's Begin Again

The substance that spattered her clothes was best left unnamed, being organic in origin. 

Especially given that she had had lunch with its owner the previous day. 

But as the being had turned out to be an assassin hired to kill the queen of Ralnoth, it was some kind of sick justice that its weapon had gone off before it could place it within the Queen’s robes. The Doctor had been unfortunately within the splash zone of the assassin’s bomb, and she wasn’t quite sure whether the goop was going to come out or not. The TARDIS could work miracles, but some things were beyond even Her reach. So the Doctor dumped her still-new outfit into the TARDIS’s laundry chute, wrapped a robe about herself, and wandered into the expansive closet. 

The first thing that came to hand was the rather battered leather coat that her Ninth self had worn, the one she had had to figure out how to install pocket dimensions into, given that in the final days of the Time War, it hadn’t been a priority to grab proper Time Lord clothing from Gallifrey. And after the cataclysm at the end of the War, the TARDIS had barely had enough energy for life support and the console room, much less the entirety of the closet. So he had scrounged about where he had landed (1970s Chicago) for human clothes, and had ended up with the jacket in a complicated deal involving no less than six aliens and a turtle in a hot dog costume. The TARDIS had been able to produce a partially-functioning sonic screwdriver by then, and the Doctor had spent the better part of an Earth week figuring out the pocket dimensions. Still, that jacket was too large for the Doctor’s current self, both in size and the feelings it evoked in her. 

Piles of the clothes of her past selves, scarves and coats and an immortal stalk of celery flew past her hands as she searched for something that would fit her smaller frame. Surely one of her female companions had left something behind. But if they had, the TARDIS was keeping it somewhere else, because the Doctor could find nothing that wouldn’t make her look like she was swimming in a tent. She still wasn’t sure how she had managed the feats of the first night in shoes that were four sizes too big for her. Finally, hands full of coats and ankle-deep in pants, she turns to find a pinstripe trouser leg poking out from under a pile of incomprehensibly frilly sixteenth-century Ovikan dress robes. She tugs it out and finds herself holding her Tenth incarnation’s suit.

Only, no, this isn’t that suit. When she holds it up to herself, she finds that it’s an appropriate length for her  _ current _ legs, and she had been considerably taller and leggier back then. Legs made for running, or so someone from that lifetime had said more than once. So either the TARDIS had shrunk something in the wash, or She was trying to choose the Doctor’s wardrobe for her. Well, far be it for the Doctor to argue with her ship. She pulled the trousers on, and was not surprised to find a matching shirt, tie, and jacket sitting on a previously empty table. The tie, from the stains, appeared to actually be one of the ones from that era, but the shirt and the jacket both had a distinctly feminine cut that the originals had never had.

Still, when she reached into the pocket, she found the contents she had carried in that life, glasses that never really corrected vision, a tin of hair pomade, and a large number of small denomination coins from at least sixteen time periods and eight galaxies. Evidently the TARDIS hadn’t created new garments, but merely altered old ones. The shoes that should’ve gone with this outfit, a pair of Converse, were nowhere to be seen, however. She looked questioningly at the ceiling, but got no response from the TARDIS. Evidently she was on her own there. Luckily her boots hadn’t been ruined by the assassin’s goop, so with a new pair of socks on, she tugged those back on. 

It was upon return to the console room that she realized she had left her sonic in the pocket of her jacket, and she groaned, knowing it would be hours before the TARDIS was done with the clothes. A blinking light on the console caught her eye, and there sat her sonic, cleaner than it had ever been.

She picked it up, looked it over, and put it in her pocket. “Have I mentioned lately how much I appreciate you?” she asked the TARDIS.

The console flashed in response.

“My first and most faithful companion,” she murmured, stroking the organic lines of the ship. She didn’t usually divulge the full extent of the TARDIS’s sentience to her companions, although a few of them figured it out eventually. She told even fewer of the deep telepathic connection they shared. 

If the Doctor believed in soulmates, the TARDIS would be hers. Stolen from a decommissioning yard more centuries ago than the Doctor cared to think about, neither the best nor brightest of their kinds, according to Gallifrey, both the last of their kinds. 

(The TARDIS kept few secrets from Her pilot, but the existence of the TARDIS’s daughter was one of them. She had entrusted a piece of Her coral to the metacrisis Doctor before he went off into the other universe with Rose Tyler. The baby TARDIS would be slow to grow and perhaps they would never be able to go further than a few minutes in time or a few feet in space, but given enough time and nurturing, their children or grandchildren would have a TARDIS of their own. She could sense the infant TARDIS faintly, and likely the child had no idea that it had a mother, but someday She hoped to meet Her child. But then, the life of a TARDIS was never sequential, and perhaps She already had.)

The Doctor’s current companions were on a much needed visit home after the events of Ralnoth, and hopefully none of them had been splashed as badly as she had. It was tempting to go get them immediately. She could pop into their futures a week after she had dropped them off and none of them would be the wiser, but a vacation was a vacation, and she always seemed to attract more trouble when she had companions (not that she would have it any other way, of course). Perhaps a nice visit to Ikkit. Tropical paradise she hadn’t visited in, oh, six hundred years or so. If she remembered correctly, they would be having a renaissance around 29300 in Earth reckoning. 

A nice vacation was just what she needed. Art, theatre, invigorating philosophical discussion, just what the Doctor called for. So she set the coordinates in time and space, and the familiar whooshing feeling that preceded every adventure swooped through her, even after all these years.

The TARDIS set down with a  _ thunk _ , and the Doctor didn’t bother to look at the viewing screen, rather, she sped toward the door, not even noticing the long brown coat that she absentmindedly grabbed on her way out. If she had, she perhaps would have expected what would happen next. 


	2. Chapter 2

Her arrival to Ikkit was unremarkable. It appeared to be a regular market day. Her suit blended into the natives’ outfits, although her blonde hair set her apart on this part of the planet. It was more usual to the people of the southern continent, but not completely unheard of here. She had arrived a few decades after she had intended, but the cultural revolution was still moving, if beginning to slow down a bit. A visit to a purveyor of books yielded some she hadn’t read yet, including one that seemed to be a treatise on time travel, always an interesting subject to a time traveller, even if it was probably completely inaccurate. 

Those went into her jacket pockets, the TARDIS would add them to Her library later, probably after reading them Herself. Most of the market’s offering were of the mundane variety, foods and drinks, trinkets, ribbons, the occasional knife or other weapon. There was an open courtyard at the opposite end of the street from from where the TARDIS had landed, and when she entered it, she found herself caught up in a sea of people. They all seemed to be observing some sort of spectacle on a stage in the center of the courtyard. 

On the stage was a group of similarly dressed people… all of them dressed nearly identically to her. One of the people in the crowd seemed to notice that she was wearing the ‘uniform’ of the people on the stage, and called attention to her.

“Oi! We’ve got a straggler over here!” he said, and thrust her forward. Hands grabbed at her until she found herself on stage, standing at the end of the line.

A man wearing elaborate robes came up the set of stairs on the other side of the stage, and the crowd fell quiet. 

“Welcome people of Ikkittery! As you know, this is the final round of our worldwide search for the next Dokto!” he said, and the crowd roared. And the Doctor remembered why she had never returned to Ikkit after the first time her Tenth self had come here. 

It had been in the early days after the regeneration when he had still been trying to both prove to Rose that he was still the Doctor and find out who he was. And he may have accidentally started a minor religion to himself. The Doctor didn’t remember the exact circumstances of the ‘miracle’, but it had involved saving someone and returning them through circumstances that could only be explained by either divine intervention or time travel. Apparently a minor religion it was not anymore, and the “Dokto” had a sizable following. 

“We now present our judges!” the announcer said, and a group of similarly robed people came up to stand next to him on stage. Whatever followed she didn’t hear, because a different voice, much quieter and probably not audible to the other people standing on stage, reached her ear. It was low and frustrated. 

“Rose,” it said. “There’s another Time Lord here.”

The Doctor didn’t move her head, but her eyes scanned the crowd looking for the source of the voice. A reply, higher and feminine came.

“I thought you said they were all gone,” she said.

“I did,” he said. “This is probably me… but I don’t see him anywhere. You’d think I’d remember starting a religion and not want to come back.”

“We came back,” Rose said.

“But we’re trying to  _ stop _ a religion,” he replied.

The rest of their conversation was drowned in a roar of the crowd as the Doctor found her hand being grabbed and raised over her head by the announcer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have this year’s Dokto!” he roared, and the crowd went wild.

Two things occured to the Doctor in that moment. The first was the reason she couldn’t remember this incident from her past life: he had carefully sealed it off after it was over, as was standard Time Lord practice for dealing with your future self. The second was the reason why he was here, this religion practiced live sacrifice, and it was considered the highest honor to be chosen. 

And she had just been chosen.

What happened next could be best described as crowdsurfing. The announcer pushes her off the stage and the crowd catches her. She’s carried along on their arms, desperately trying to get a foot on the ground. She’s moved toward the outside of the courtyard, but the crowd itself is moving, and she’s nowhere near the edge.

A hand grabbed at her ankle, and another at her elbow, and she’s pulled down. Her feet hit the ground, and the hand on her elbow tugged her into an alley. She found herself face to face with her Tenth self, his brown eyes wide. He looked her over, and then released her arm. A shout went up from the crowd, they’ve noticed she’d disappeared. 

“Run,” he said, and sped off down the alley. 

Now, logically, the Doctor knew that she’s already lived through this once, but it’s cold comfort when there’s an angry mob chasing you. They pelt down the alley toward a destination the younger Doctor seemed to know. At an intersection, a sprinting Rose Tyler joined them. Another corner, and there was the TARDIS. Not hers, but his. It’s not so much different from the outside, but there are enough to tell the Doctor that this is not her TARDIS (besides the fact hers was parked half a mile across the city).

They entered the ship, Rose bringing up the rear, and barely slammed the door in time to keep the crowd out. The younger Doctor runs up to the console, flips a switch, slams a button, and the TARDIS  _ vworps.  _ There’s the instant of  _ change _ that always comes when She enters the Vortex, but not the one that comes when She exits it. So he has suspended them in the Vortex. Safest place, all things considered. 

The Doctor had stopped her headlong flight into the console room by arresting her momentum on one of the coral struts. She looked around, and laughed to herself. The feeling of seeing a past TARDIS control room always had given the Doctor an odd sense of being in the wrong time. It was probably what their companions felt whenever they brought humans to the past. She remembered this TARDIS, from not quite half a lifetime ago. It always had been one of her favorites, and she thought her TARDIS had taken some notes from this redecoration. 

“Right,” the younger Doctor said, turning from the console. He was oddly dressed for this self, instead of a suit, he wore a corduroy jacket and grey dress trousers. The less to get selected for sacrifice to the gods, apparently. “Sorry about that. I couldn’t in good conscience let them sacrifice another person. Especially given that I’m their god. Your god?” He continued talking for a solid five minutes before she could get a word in edgewise. She had forgotten how much this version of the Doctor could talk. 

“Doctor,” Rose finally managed to insert. “Perhaps you should start at the beginning.”

“Oh!” the younger Doctor said. “Right. Sorry. I’m the Doctor, this is Rose Tyler, and we’re in my ship. And you... “ here he froze. And narrowed his eyes, looking straight at her. “You already know all this.”

“I do,” the Doctor said. “Although it’s a nice refresher.”

“Why did you come back?” he asked, eyes darkening. 

The Doctor remembered that darkness. After the Time War, it had been so close to the surface of their mind. Her Ninth and Tenth selves had held it close to them, only allowing it to show through in times of great distress. This version, Ten, had covered it with boyish geniality. 

She reverted to the thinking that had helped her in other times when the various Doctors had come together and privately assigned him as “Ten” for the time being. It helped in separating the current parallel timelines. 

“I, ah, I forgot,” she said carefully. “It’s been a long time between you and me, and you know sometimes the details get lost.”

“You forgot creating a religion dedicated to yourself?” he asked, eyebrow raising.

“Yep.”

“Doctor?” Rose interjected. “What exactly does she mean?”

“She means, Rose,” Ten said, “that she’s lived so long that she’s forgotten what it was to be me.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Tell me, do  _ you _ remember the details of everything our First self did?”

Ten stared hard at her for almost a full minute before uttering a soft Gallifreyan curse and throwing his hands up. “Tell me then, how long has it been between me and you?”

“I’m a little under twice your age,” the Doctor replied, hedging around the question he was actually asking.

“You’re telling me I’ve lived another thousand years?” Ten asked.

“More like eight hundred, but yes.”

“You’re the Doctor?” Rose asked, seeming to finally catch up. “A future version?”

“I am,” the Doctor replied, turning to her former companion with a grin. She buried the feelings she had left on a beach in a different dimension deep, or at least tried to. 

“Does he turn into you?” Rose asked. 

The question shocked a laugh out of the younger Doctor. He was still close to the Time Lords, still held them in recent memory, and the sheer cheekiness of the question from that perspective delighted him. Regeneration had always been kept in hushed whispers and almost never revealed to humans. For one to speak of it so brazenly was unheard of. 

“Not directly,” the Doctor answered, voice amused. 

“I suppose it’s useless trying to get that information out of you,” Ten said. “Right, then. We have a cult to stop.”

“It’s only a cult because you started it!” the Doctor said.

“It was an accident!” 

Neither of them noticed that their voices had gotten higher and higher pitched, both increasing in volume and rapidity. Rose looked from one to the other, still reeling from meeting a future version of the Doctor, and one who seemed to be a  _ woman _ at that. She promptly gave up on trying to understand them, and went off into the TARDIS, looking for something to eat. She had done a lot of running around today, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> The tumbls @anakinslefthand


End file.
